A Trial Balance With Only One Axis
A journal entry here carries an account, an amount, a reference and a description. It carries no branch, no department, no project and no cost centre — so profit by anything other than account is not a report that has not been built. It is a question the data cannot answer.
The position, stated first
The ledger has one axis and it is the account. If you need profit by branch, by department or by project out of the general ledger, this product does not do it and no report could — the dimension is not on the entry. Operational reporting can still answer a lot of those questions from the modules; the trial balance cannot.
There is a difference between a report that has not been written and a question the data cannot answer, and almost nothing in a product demonstration distinguishes them.
Seven columns
A journal entry in this product holds an account, whether it is a debit or a credit, an amount, a reference, a description, and links back to the stock adjustment or item that produced it.
That is a complete double-entry record. It is also, in reporting terms, one-dimensional: the only thing you can group by is the account.
And the account itself is a flat list. There is no account code, no parent account and no class — statement grouping is done by a fixed internal map rather than by a numbering scheme you control.
Questions people expect a general ledger to answer
| Question | From the ledger | From a module |
|---|---|---|
| What did we spend on repairs? | Yes | Yes |
| What did the Rotterdam branch spend on repairs? | No | Partly — configurable by you |
| What is the profit of this depot? | No | No |
| What did this project cost? | No | Yes |
| What is the total of this account? | Yes | No |
| A numbered statutory chart | No | No |
Built and maintained Configurable by you, not maintained by us Not built
The "part" is the honest answer: modules can often answer a branch question about their own domain. What none of them can do is combine into a profit figure, because that combination is the ledger's job.
The workaround people reach for — an account per branch — turns the chart of accounts into a spreadsheet with the branch encoded in the row labels.
Why that workaround is worse than it looks
Faced with a single axis, the instinct is to overload it: Repairs — Rotterdam, Repairs — Antwerp, Repairs — Head Office. It works, in the sense that the numbers come out.
What it costs is every other question. Total repairs now requires knowing which accounts are repairs accounts. Adding a branch means creating a copy of every expense account. Closing one leaves a permanent tail of accounts with balances. And there is no account numbering to impose an order on any of it.
A dimension multiplies; an axis that encodes two things multiplies badly. Three branches and forty expense accounts is a hundred and twenty accounts, and the hundred and twenty-first is a fourth branch nobody wants to open.
What is genuinely available instead
A good deal, and it is worth being specific because the ledger limitation reads as bleaker than the practical position is.
Projects carry their own cost: materials issued to a job are stamped with the cost at the moment of issue, time logged against tasks carries a rate, and expenses can be attributed. So project cost is a real, first-class figure — it just does not live in the general ledger.
Stock is held per location, so stock value by branch is answerable from inventory. Sales and payments carry their own records. What none of that produces is a profit figure per segment, because profit is the ledger's output and the ledger has no segment.
Where a segment question can and cannot be answered
Operational modules
Dimensioned
- Stock by location
- Project cost by job, with issue-time costs
- Sales by customer
- Payments by supplier and rail
The ledger
One axis
- Account only
- No branch, department, project or fund
- A flat account list with no codes or parents
- An empty equity group, so no complete balance sheet
Segment operational reporting: available. Segment financial reporting: not available, and not a matter of writing a report.
What AWRA OpsHub does today
- Full double-entry posting from system flows, with the adjustment or item that produced each entry linked from it.
- A trial balance and statement grouping by account.
- Project cost assembled from issued stock at stamped issue-time cost, logged time and attributed expenses.
- Stock valuation per location, so stock by branch is answerable.
- An internal integrity screen comparing the ledger against stock, open orders and the payments register.
What it does not do
- Any dimension on a journal entry — no branch, department, project, cost centre or fund.
- Segment profit reporting of any kind.
- Account codes, parent accounts or account classes; the chart is a flat list.
- A numbered statutory chart of accounts, which is impossible by construction rather than unbuilt.
- Manual journal entries, so an accrual, prepayment or correcting entry cannot be posted by a person.
- A complete balance sheet — the equity grouping is empty, so retained earnings and capital are unrepresented.
Not ours, by choice
- This is the clearest single reason this ledger is not a statutory book of account, and we would rather say that on a public page than let a demonstration imply otherwise.
- Operational segment reporting is genuinely available and is what most businesses actually act on day to day. It is the financial consolidation by segment that is out of reach.
- Nothing here is British, Irish or Dutch. Europe is here because segment reporting is an ordinary management expectation in those markets, which makes the single axis a live constraint rather than a theoretical one.
Two, and they are a project rather than a feature
We would rather size this honestly than offer a column. A dimension is only useful once every posting path sets it and every report can group by it.
Dimensions on the journal entry
Branch, department and project on the entry, set by the posting path that produced it rather than typed — a stock issue already knows its job, a till sale already knows its counter. The column is the small part; teaching every posting path to populate it, and every statement to group by it, is the work.
A numbered, hierarchical chart of accounts
Account codes, parents and classes, with statement grouping derived from the structure instead of from a fixed internal map — and an equity grouping that is not empty. This is what makes a statutory chart possible at all, and it is a prerequisite for anyone who has to file on one.
How it works: you describe the requirement, we return a written scope, timeline and cost, and once agreed it is built into your environment and maintained as part of the product. If segment financial reporting is a requirement rather than a preference, raise it before a trial — this is a structural fit question.
Talk to us about ledger structureFour questions about a general ledger
What columns does a journal entry carry?
A good answer sounds like
A list including dimensions.
What it actually means
The fastest structural question there is. Everything about segment reporting follows from the answer.
Can I produce a profit and loss for one branch?
A good answer sounds like
Yes, by dimension.
What it actually means
If the answer involves separate accounts per branch, the product has one axis and is overloading it.
Do accounts have codes and parents?
A good answer sounds like
Yes, both.
What it actually means
A flat list makes a numbered statutory chart impossible rather than inconvenient.
Can a person post a manual journal?
A good answer sounds like
Yes, with approval.
What it actually means
Without it, no accrual, prepayment or correction can be entered, which is decisive for whether this is a book of account.
Ask for the columns, not the reports
A report list tells you what somebody built. The columns on the entry tell you what could ever be built, and that is the question worth ten minutes in any evaluation.
Talk about financial reportingFrequently asked questions
Can I use the reference field for a branch?
You can put anything in it, and it is free text with no validation and no grouping behind it. It converts an impossible query into a fragile one, which is occasionally worth doing and should never be mistaken for a dimension.
Is project cost really available?
Yes, and it is properly built — materials are stamped with their cost at the moment of issue, so a closed job costs the same amount twice regardless of what happens to prices afterwards. It sits in the project module rather than in the ledger.
What does the empty equity grouping mean in practice?
That retained earnings and capital are unrepresented in the statement grouping, so a complete balance sheet is not producible from this ledger. It is listed as a gap rather than described as a limitation of the reports.
